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ANDREW: Twenty-five years ago, a hurricane miles away became personal

Florida City: Gary Davis cradles his chihuahua Boo Boo in front of his mobile home in the Goldcoaster Mobile Home Park the morning after Hurricane Andrew hit overnight in 1992. After his home disintegrated around him, Davis spent the rest of the night in his truck . (Photo by Lannis Waters / The Palm Beach Post)

Posted: 12:05 p.m. Friday, August 18, 2017

WEST PALM BEACH
—

In the early hours of Aug. 24, 1992, a South Florida businessman named John Ellis Bush huddled with his family at the Coral Gables home of his business partner. Outside was Hurricane Andrew.

The man, whose father happened at the time to be the president of the United States, later would himself become governor of Florida, and often would brag that he was the only sitting governor who’d been in a top-end Category 5 hurricane, one of only three on record to strike North America.

Jeb Bush wasn’t alone that night. It’s estimated a half-million South Floridians, cowering and praying, experienced Category 5 winds in Hurricane Andrew. Never before had a storm that strong struck a place so populated — and not since.

The profound natural disaster visited on southern Miami-Dade County a quarter-century ago this week was not a Palm Beach County-Treasure Coast event. Neither was Fort Sumter nor Pearl Harbor nor Sept. 11. But like them and so many other historic moments, Andrew became a local story for all of us.

We braced for a storm that, just 12 hours ahead of landfall, appeared headed for Boca Raton before making a jog that, in global terms, was a twitch of a butterfly wing.

We watched thousands of motorists stream up from the south, headed to Central and North Florida, and frequently come to a dead stop for up to hours at places like the Lantana toolbooth of Florida’s Turnpike, like a scene from a bad 1950s atom bomb movie.

As the winds died, we frantically checked on loved ones at Ground Zero who we dreaded surely must have been killed.

We made our way down in the ensuing days to help manage what, in the short run, was nothing less than a collapse of civilization. We went to help restore order, or help with cleanup, or, sadly, in rare cases, make a quick buck on the misery of others.

We staffed an unprecedented distribution operation near West Palm Beach at the South Florida Fairgrounds, formed of a necessity born of chaos, and helped get supplies to desperate neighbors down south who’d have given anything for just a warm shower and a clean T-shirt.

We opened our mail to find insurers had tanked, or bolted, or told many of us: “Sorry. You’re on your own.”

We watched as our state leaders took a hard look at a system that had gathered dust during uneventful decades, even as Florida’s population exploded — leaders who instituted landmark changes that made Florida the model for the rest of America’s hurricane states.

We saw moving vans next door, as Miami-Dade residents threw up their hands and sought a new life two counties away. Or three. Or five.

We decided, some of us, that the great oddsmaker in the sky had determined South Florida had gotten its big storm and we all would get a break for a while — a decidedly dumb premise, as it turned out (see Charley, Frances, Jeanne, Wilma).

But most of us took Andrew’s sledgehammer of a hint and finally started paying attention to what forecasters and emergency managers and engineers and insurers had preached for years about preparation, mitigation and planning; had done so even as we mocked them as Chicken Littles and ignored their calls because we had a tee time. We now knew we couldn’t ignore them anymore.

Even those of us who were living somewhere else that day in August 1992, or hadn’t yet been born, live with the changes Andrew brought about.

Every hurricane that has followed has been judged against Andrew. Just ask the people for whom, after 25 years, it’s still in some way a part of their lives. That would be all of us.

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